This was discussed here before about a conference in my area. Now there is a lawsuit.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports...hool-headlines
Suit filed in SICA breakup
By Michael Higgins
Tribune staff reporter
April 10, 2006, 6:33 PM CDT
A group of students, parents and educators from the southern suburbs filed a federal lawsuit Monday alleging racial discrimination motivated the formation of two new athletic and extracurricular conferences dominated by predominantly white school districts.
The suit, whose plaintiffs include two predominantly black school districts, accuses 13 other districts of engaging in "white flight" and "secession" by pulling out of the racially diverse South Inter-Conference Association (SICA).
The suit accuses the mostly white districts of violating federal civil rights laws by creating "a racial Mason-Dixon line down I-57," the highway that separates the SICA districts on the east from the new conferences on the west.
A total of 22 high schools have left or have announced their intent to leave the 33-school SICA, according to the suit, filed in U.S. District Court, Chicago.
"The new Southwest Suburban Conference, which was formed during the past year by the secession of predominantly white schools from SICA, is 75 percent white," attorney Matthew J. Piers said. "The new South Suburban Conference, which announced its formation effective in the fall, is 60 percent white."
SICA would be left predominantly black in all but one school, the plaintiffs said.
"What we have here is a classic case of white flight, with a twist," Piers said at a news conference this morning at the Dirksen Federal Courthouse in downtown Chicago.
Other attorneys in the case include members of the Chicago Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.
The plaintiffs seek a court injunction preventing the departing districts from forming new conferences, forcing them to return to the Inter-Conference Association and organizing and scheduling inter-scholastic events in a way that does not result in racial segregation.
Two of the litigants are themselves school districts: Thornton Fractional School District 215, and Thornton Township High School District 205.
"We're educators. We're supposed to be helping kids see how it is to be together," District 215 Supt. Robert Wilhite said. Instead, he said, "we segregated and went backwards in time."
Wilhite said it "is just not right" that the schools remaining in the Inter-Conference Association after the split would be 80 percent minority.
Wilhite said he didn't buy the other school districts' stated reasons for leaving the conference, such as travel times. Noting how the conference has been in existence for 33 years, he said, "I don't know how all of a sudden, it's a big issue."
The plaintiffs have concluded that race is the real reason for the breakup, because "the other things don't make any sense," he said.
District 205 Supt. Kamala Buckner said the split affects not just sports.
"There's a greater impact on extracurricular activities – that would be the drama clubs, the chess clubs, all of the speech clubs … the ability for the students to compete at high levels in a diverse environment," Buckner said.
"We are being deprived of the opportunity to compete against other children of other different ethnicities," said Constance Stanley, a junior on the speech team and the drama club at Thornwood High School, 17101 S. Park Ave., South Holland.
Denise Snelling, a Thornwood parent, said, "Its disheartening because I've lived in the south suburbs for over 20 years, and before the white flight started, all of these people who don't want our children competing against them used to be my neighbors."
"These kids grew up together, they were friends," Snelling said. Then, she added, their parents moved west, and "now they don't want them to come back into our neighborhoods."
WGN-Ch. 9 contributed to this story.
Copyright © 2006, Chicago Tribune
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